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Sunday, 26 March 2017

During a panel at the American Copy Editors Society national conference in St. Petersburg, Florida, on Friday, it was announced that the 2017 AP Stylebook will include guidance on the limited use of “they” as a singular pronoun.

The addition is immediately available to AP Stylebook Online subscribers and will be included in the new print edition of the Stylebook when it is published on May 31. Key passages from the new entry include:

They, them, their — In most cases, a plural pronoun should agree in number with the antecedent: The children love the books their uncle gave them.They/them/their is acceptable in limited cases as a singular and-or gender-neutral pronoun, when alternative wording is overly awkward or clumsy. However, rewording usually is possible and always is preferable. Clarity is a top priority; gender-neutral use of a singular they is unfamiliar to many readers. We do not use other gender-neutral pronouns such as xe or ze…

Wednesday, 15 March 2017

We are happy to announce that we are re-opening Phase 1 of the Fight AIDS@Home project. In collaboration with World Community Grid, and thanks to their affiliated volunteers around the globe, High Throughput Virtual Screening will be performed by targeting the HIV-1 capsid protein with the goal of discovering new chemical compounds to defeat the AIDS virus (HIV).Read morein this update.Join World Community Grid & help with this and similar projects here.

Attempts to cure HIV have been thwarted by a particular type of immune-system cell that can hide the virus. These long-lived infected T cells can evade detection by the body for years, and are hard to find, study and kill. Reliably identifying these covert reservoirs is top of the wish-list for HIV researchers, but they've had limited success.

That may soon change with the identification of a protein called CD32a. It sits on the surface of T cells that are infected, but lie dormant. Researchers reported their findings on 15 March in Nature. Like a police sketch of a criminal, the protein provides a way to distinguish these sleeper T cells from other immune-system cells. And it provides hope that scientists could target these silent, infected cells and destroy them...